Global warming is a religion

The essential feature of any religion is that its pronouncements are to be accepted on the basis of faith as opposed to hard evidence. Questioning those pronouncements makes one a sinner.

No one denies that the Earth’s temperature changes. Millions of years ago, much of our planet was covered by ice, at some places up to a mile thick, a period some scientists call “Snowball Earth.”

Today, the Earth is not covered by a mile of ice; a safe conclusion is that there must have been a bit of global warming. I don’t know the cause of that warming, but I’d wager everything I own that it was not caused by coal-fired electric generation plants, incandescent light bulbs and SUVs tooling up and down the highways.

The very idea that mankind can make significant parametric changes to the Earth has to be the height of arrogance. How about a few questions because temperature is just one characteristic of the Earth. The Earth’s orbit is another.

If all 6.5 billion of us, all at once, started jumping up and down for a little while, do you think we’d change the Earth’s orbit or rotation? Do you think mankind could change the direction and timing of the ocean’s tides? Is there anything that mankind can do to stop or start a tsunami or hurricane?

You say, “Williams, it’s stupid to suggest that mankind could change the Earth’s orbit or rotation, ocean tides or cause or stop a tsunami or hurricane!” You’re right and it’s also stupid to think that mankind’s activities can make globalized changes in the Earth’s temperature.

Nonetheless, there is much at stake in getting people to subscribe to the global warming religion. There is so much at stake that some scientists, using government grants, are fraudulently manipulating climate data and engaging in criminal activity, as revealed in what has been called “Climate gate.”

One of the most dangerous features of the global warming religion is its level of intimidation of heretics or would-be heretics.

A few years back, Dr. Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel’s climatologist, advocated that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of manmade global warming.

On one of her shows, Dr. Cullen featured columnist Dave Roberts, who, in his Sept. 19, 2006, online publication, said, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

As a result, many climatologists have been intimidated into silence. That means the public is not informed about counter-alarmists facts such as: Over long periods of time, there is absolutely no close relationship between C02 levels and temperature.

There was an explosion of life forms 550 million years ago (Cambrian Period) when CO2 levels were 18 times higher than today.

During the Jurassic Period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, CO2 levels were as much as nine times higher than today.

Contrary to what educators are brainwashing our children with, polar bear numbers increased dramatically from around 5,000 in 1950 to as many as 25,000 today, higher than any time in the 20th century.

Political commentator Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) warned that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

That’s the political goal of the global warmers.

[Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.] COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM

Comments

Remember the iconic NASA photograph of the planet earth rising over the horizon of the moon. The earth is finite and bounded.

In 1492 when Columbus landed at Plymouth rock, Old growth forest stretched from the high water mark of the Atlantic ocean, unbroken to the great plains where millions of buffalo roamed at will and the passenger pigeon filled the skies of the American Midwest in flocks so great it would take them an hour to pass overhead.

The bison were driven to the brink of extinction, and the last known passenger pigeon died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914 three years before the start of WWI. The old growth forest is gone, likely forever, as the land was cleared for short term profits and the forest that replaces it in places like GSMNP is a cheap substitute of the grandeur that was once there.

In 1770 when the industrial revolution there were 700 million people on Earth. Now there are 7 Billion. The is a order of magnitude of growth in just over 300 years.

Global warming is real. It is caused by injection of carbon dioxide and over greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by man, faster than nature can extract it.

If the current trends do not change drastically in short order, scenarios like the one called out in the 1960s Charleton Heston Movie, Solyent Green will become reality.

Remember the photo of the rising Earth, it is finite and bounded.

Is it the manifest destiny of mankind to leave it spent and barren antiseptic and sterile ? Because as goes the fate of mother Earth, so goes the fate of mankind.